eck.

I felt his warm wet tongue on my hands. His flanks quivered. He shook
with happiness.

In front of us, lighted in the center, another room opened up. In the
middle six men were squatting on the matting, playing dice and
drinking coffee from tiny copper coffee cups with long stems.

They were the white Tuareg.

A lamp, hung from the ceiling, threw a circle of light over them.
Everything outside that circle was in deep shadow.

The black faces, the copper cups, the white robes, the moving light
and shadow, made a strange etching.

They played with a reserved dignity, announcing the throws in raucous
voices.

Then, slowly, very slowly, I slipped the leash from the collar of the
impatient little beast.

"Go, boy."

He leapt with a sharp yelp.

And what I had foreseen happened.

The first bound of King Hiram carried him into the midst of the white
Tuareg, sowing confusion in the bodyguard. Another leap carried him
into the shadow again. I made out vaguely the shaded opening of
another corridor on the side of the room opposite where I was
standing.

"There!" I thought.

The confusion in the room was indescribable, but noiseless. One
realized the restraint which nearness to a great presence imposed upon
the exasperated guards. The stakes and the dice-boxes had rolled in
one direction, the copper cups, in the other.

Two of the Tuareg, doubled up with pain, were rubbing their ribs with
low oaths.

I need not say that I profited by this silent confusion to glide into
the room. I was now flattened against the wall of the second corridor,
down which King Hiram had just disappeared.

At that moment a clear gong echoed in the silence. The trembling which
seized the Tuareg assured me that I had chosen the right way.

One of the six men got up. He passed me and I fell in behind him. I
was perfectly calm. My least movement was perfectly calculated.

"All that I risk here now," I said to myself, "is being led back
politely to my room."

The Targa lifted a curtain. I followed on his heels into the chamber
of Antinea.

The room was huge and at once well lighted and very dark. While the
right half, where Antinea was, gleamed under shaded lamps, the left
was dim.

Those who have penetrated into a Mussulman home know what a _guignol_
is, a kind of square niche in the wall, four feet from the floor, its
opening covered by a curtain. One mounts to it by wooden steps. I
noticed such a _guignol_ at my left. I